Unslept

As you stagger in, your eyes struggling to focus, your throat claggy with sleep unslept, you might expect it to be more or less deserted, save for the odd bomb-disposal squad blowing up someone's lost suitcase.

And in the midst of the mirror-like stillness through which it was impossible to see the great machineries grinding, my mother, the brand-new Amina Sinai, who also looked still and unchanging although great things were happening beneath her skin, woke up one morning with a head buzzing with insomnia and a tongue thickly coated with unslept sleep and found herself saying aloud, without meaning to at all, "What's the sun doing here, Allah? It's come up in the wrong place.'

My eyes burn from sleep unslept and from tears unshed. I long for oblivion. I am impossibly tired.

The high-tension wires were lightning held forever, blazing, a threat above the unslept houses.

Tom's room was empty, the bed unslept in.

For a whole lifetime With no guaranties And promises not kept How ever hard you try to please All the nights unslept

Awakened to the lighted room by the rining telephone beside her bed, she reached across the vacant unslept pillow and glanced automatically at the clock—the book she'd been reading slid sideways off the coverlet in a spill of pages onto the floor.

Dawn of a new day, me unslept from the old, a refugee from the night.